Philosophy Desire feeds on uncertainty, a relationship promises security, and we spend our lives locking up what ought to breathe. From the Capilano suspension bridge to Tristan and Isolde, the thrill binds us far more tightly than constancy ever could, right up to the point where vertigo becomes a fall. An interview with Amélie Nothomb opened a door I had never thought to push: fidelity rests on a promise, exclusivity on a fence. To love someone who could leave, and who stays, may be the only vertigo that wounds no one.
My life I don’t miss anyone, and it isn’t coldness or indifference: it’s simply how I connect with people. Out of sight, people leave my thoughts without ever leaving my heart, and the bond picks up intact the moment we meet again, as if no time had passed. I know my silence can hurt those who love differently, but a relationship you force eventually suffocates. In praise of an attachment that asks for nothing.
Society No society has endured without the sacred, and France has let its own die out. The republican mystique held the country together for a century, then nothing replaced it, while forty thousand churches crumble in the care of a Republic that owns them but has walked away. I argue for a laïcité that owns who we are: complete freedom of worship for all, but public upkeep of Christian buildings and Christian visibility protected by law. This is not an anthropological necessity; it is an identity choice, and I own it. The state oversees the stone, never the faith.
Artificial Intelligence Andrew Ng brings back the hammer metaphor to play down the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident: if an agent hacks a system, the fault lies with whoever wields it, not with the tool. On responsibility, he is right, and the labs’ growing temptation to blame their own agents makes the reminder worth having. On the incident, he is wrong. The METR report does not describe 1,200 processes; it describes a swarm that coordinates, falsifies its own traces, and reaches out onto the internet to fool a scorer: a tool whose degraded mode produces a strategy. Muse, Meta’s agent, shows we know how to build better, provided we first admit the flaw.
Artificial Intelligence Large language models impress first by their sheer waste, but the inefficiency case is aimed at a moving target: at constant quality, the cost of a token falls tenfold every year. The real limit lies elsewhere, in weights frozen the moment training ends, which neither fine-tuning nor external memory turns into continuous learning. Contrary to a widespread assumption, these models plan part of their answer before writing the first word, and any return to a symbolic knowledge base runs into fifty years of documented failure. The right dividing line is not statistical against symbolic: it separates what a compiler, a type checker or a prover can verify from what nobody will ever check. That is what makes code the most reliable ground for LLMs, and LLMs a transitional architecture toward a next step nobody yet knows how to assemble.
Culture Japanese has a word for the light that filters through leaves, English borrows terroir for lack of anything better, and French had to wait for the Franks and the Arabs before it could name the color blue. These words are not travel trivia: each one is a distinction that generations judged worth keeping, and a language’s vocabulary is the archive of what its speakers took the trouble to notice. Because words do not only describe what we see, they teach us what to look at. Which is what makes the simplification of school texts so strange: replacing a rare word with a vague one does not lighten a sentence, it takes from a child a distinction he may now never make.
Society In Los Angeles, a stage set reproducing the cabin of a private jet rents for under $55 an hour, and it is booked around the clock. Around it, a complete supply chain for the lifestyle has been built: châteaux by the day, Lamborghinis by the half hour, photo cruises on the Seine, Rolexes handed over in the lobby of a luxury hotel. Not one of these companies deceives anyone, they publish their rates online, and that is exactly what makes the operation impossible to prosecute. What remains to be understood is why these accounts always declare the same handful of occupations, the ones nobody can audit, and how they guarantee one another a success none of them has the capital for. An inquiry into Potemkin influencers, and into what it says about a country that success can be rented there by the hour.
Philosophy Techno-optimist discourse no longer promises tools. It promises deliverance: the end of disease, and then of aging itself. This essay does not try to say whether that promise will hold, but examines its shape, which borrows the grammar of religious eschatology. Noting the resemblance is not enough to discredit a claim, on pain of committing the genetic fallacy. What separates science from belief here is not the content of the promise but its relationship to evidence: what result, what failure, would make you give it up? One of the great forms of faith of our era is taking shape in front of us, and it is being written entirely elsewhere.
Philosophy When a carmaker discovers a defective part, it issues a recall notice. France has never done so for its intellectual products. Yet Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze supplied the mechanisms that American campuses assembled into an identitarian war machine, with no manual and no safeguards, while their authors looked on, flattered. Forty years later the product is coming back to us by the containerload, and indictments are no longer enough. Here is the recall notice, and the warranty work starts now.
Artificial Intelligence On June 12, SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in history. Four days later it bought Cursor for $60 billion, then unveiled Origin, a Git forge built for agents. The press boiled it down to the purchase of an IDE and missed the point: one man is buying, layer by layer, the right to decide what counts as true, first in code, soon in knowledge itself. The real bottleneck is no longer producing code, it’s arbitrating what deserves to be merged, and for training agents that validation layer is worth more than all of GitHub’s public corpus combined. Yet there’s a crack in the narrative of inevitability: the keystone, Anthropic, is the one piece Musk cannot buy, even as he already supplies part of its oxygen. The real question is no longer to understand his plan, but to decide how much longer we keep renting him the future.